


Call of the Blood

by samidha



Series: Metamorphosis [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, POV Soulless Sam Winchester, Sam Has Powers, Sam's Missing Year, Soulless Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-01-20
Updated: 2011-01-20
Packaged: 2018-12-01 15:34:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11489370
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/samidha/pseuds/samidha
Summary: Metamorphosis #3. End of this series. (Complete.) Goings on with Soulless Sam over S5-S6 hiatus. Soulless Sam's missing year, written as speculation at the time.





	Call of the Blood

Light surrounds him on all sides. The world is blinding. The pain might stop if he could just-- stay-- still-- but the only thing he knows is light and motion.

And solitude. Endless solitude. One hundred years of it, he thinks wildly, and tries to spread himself, to take up more room in the cage. There are no edges here. The cage is expansive, an endless field filled with nothing, and nowhere at all for him to go.

There are no binds, no limits, no confines, but there is nothing else either. 

It’s simple: This is the end.

There is no more.

Until he sees a spot before him, the tiniest speck of darkness amid the light, so small he thinks it is only imagined. He expects it’s only an after-image, but it grows, and he holds a sudden certainty that something is coming. He squints into the light and he waits.

He’s ready for anything.

There is no time, and when he tries to close his eyes the light doesn’t fade. 

Sam tears apart, like grains of sand flying on the wind, each one coming free like he is being ripped apart molecule by molecule. His entire world is waiting and pain. He has no proof that what he is waiting for will be any different--his only hope is that it is different.

He doesn’t aim for it to be better.

Eons pass. He focuses his gaze on the darkness at first, embracing it and the relief that comes from having it in his sight, but eventually his pain is too intense, hot and bright in a new way.

Pain becomes his world.

He loses track of the darkness, only silently aching for change, for (Dean) even a moment’s respite, but he is on fire and there is nothing to quench the flames.

Then darkness settles over him in one quick sweep like cooling water slipping over his head after a dive. All he can see is a cloaked figure whose presence pulls at the light, absorbing it. He knows it is only taking a form that he can recognize, like a shape in the clouds. The darkness is complete and unchanging, not a single ripple of movement until--

This is no place for you, it says, the words razor-sharp and biting across his awareness.

The form reaches for him, reaches inside of him and he is ripped into thousands and thousands of pieces all at once. The pain is new, sudden and unbelievable.

When the light resolves impossibly into a door, he can feel the other half of him trying to launch itself through but it is held back with no effort at all by the darkness while he is pushed through, hard and sudden.

As he lies in the field, naked and shivering, there is only one important difference.

*~*~*

Castiel, he calls, and nothing happens. Nothing. 

He is seething with anger and yet unsurprised. No angel has ever come when he called. He is still the damned, risen from hell for no reason that he can fathom.

Castiel, he calls again, and he knows this is somehow different from the other times he has taken up the angel’s name. He can’t put his finger on what exactly is missing. In its place is a well of frustration and anger that fuels him to the core.

Finally, he leaves the field. The angel isn’t coming. He has work to do.

He thinks of a movie while he frightens a gas station clerk enough with the power of his voice and the false promise of a gun, watches the man shiver and shake as he pulls his clothes off and hands them all to Sam.

He leaves the clerk with his socks and his car keys. It is more charitable than he feels like being. On second thought, he hot-wires the little white truck in the parking lot anyway, and he feels better.

He has arrived.

*~*~*

For the first month, he haunts the places that he remembers. 

Cicero pulls him in first, like magnetic north, and when he finds the man he seeks there it is difficult to pull his eyes away. 

He stays for four days, standing underneath flickering street lights in the dark, ducking behind the neighboring houses in the morning as the man heads out to work.

He settles into a coffee shop across the highway from the man’s construction project during the day. He orders a coffee but doesn’t drink it.

He remembers other times, hears a tiny, inconsequential voice that calls Dean and brother, like an itch on the back of his neck. He squashes it down.

He looks at the time. In half an hour the diner will be full of construction workers. He throws down some cash and goes outside, settles into the back of the new Charger he nabbed from a dealership, and he waits.

Hell taught him the power of endurance, and he does not rest.

He watches.

*~*~*

In Cold Oak, he stays for one full night and day and comes away with four people that, in another existence, he might have called friends. Now he only holds their lives in his hands. He sends them on their mission to Cicero, because he no longer has the time, nor the inclination, to stay indefinitely with the man he once called brother. 

He has hunting to do.

He looks forward to the blood on his hands and the screams in the night.

It beats the endless hours of nothing when the world goes dark and quiet.

*~*~*

In South Dakota, he lets Singer do all the tests he needs to for his own peace of mind. The older man asks about Dean and he shrugs.

”I think he’s happy, Bobby,” he says, and watches the hunter brighten.

”Well, ain’t that somethin’.”

”Yeah,” he says, and tries to put something behind it. 

He’s never sure if he succeeds.

At the end of the day he doesn’t much care.

*~*~*

He skins a cat alive, then sticks it expertly in the side. He lets its blood and bones spill out onto blacktop, and completes the ritual with flawless Latin: blood calls to blood. He sees the flash of a large building in his mind’s eye and thinks, Compound. The entrails point him west. He goes.

When he arrives at his destination he interrupts a hunter’s own family reunion. Samuel Campbell sits among his grandchildren as they cut him with silver and tip holy water into gin.

Sam doesn’t tell them he dispatched their sentry to get into the safe-house. He stands tall and proud, not slouching an inch, and he dares them to ask him.

”Got a case for you all,” he says, and he watches Gwen tip more holy water into a drink, her eyes dark and wary.

She is the only woman in a room full of many men, and Sam is just one more.

She has potential. For what, he isn’t quite sure.

When he smiles at her, it feels unnatural on his face.

He’s pretty sure that she agrees.

*~*~*

They hunt. They follow Sam’s lead to a nest of djinn but the alpha is nowhere to be found and Samuel’s rage is palpable in the air.

This is something he recognizes. He feels it burning in his own gut like a stiff drink.

Eat or drink. Two other things he doesn’t do anymore. Gives him a lot of time for people-watching. Sometimes he thinks back to a time when he could enjoy it. Still, he watches the Campbells close, when he can stand to be among people. He watches them and tries their emotions on his face.

Sometimes he’s even sure they look genuine.

*~*~*

”Tell the truth,” he growls at the witness. ”Lie to me again and I swear you’ll live to regret it.”

They always believe him.

*~*~*

In Nevada, he rips apart a chupacabra with his bare hands. The blood tells the story of a good day’s work.

*~*~*

He’s hustling pool for gas money when a woman catches his eye. He drops his cue then and there. He has enough. He wants this more.

Her eyes tell him he is in the right place at the right time.

He takes her in the bathroom, hearing Dean’s voice in the back of his head. Quick and dirty, huh, Sammy?

He remembers a time when he would have been embarrassed.

He doesn’t remember what that feels like anymore.

*~*~*

When the Campbells hear of another group of djinn amassing in Cicero, it’s Samuel himself who calls him, and he feels white-hot rage. He made sure Dean was fine--he was fine. He had sent the group from Cold Oak. It should have been enough. 

Now he faces down the reunion that he never really wanted.

He won’t be able to fool Dean.

He isn’t sure why he needs to, only that it will be harder than it was with the Campbells.

”We’re heading out tomor--” Samuel says.

Sam growls into the phone, ”Not soon enough,” and hangs up, picking up his duffels of weapons and racing out the door to the car.

*~*~*

As he gets closer, the voice in his head that he knows as Dean’s gets louder. Dogging him for miles. Done playing hard to get, Sammy?

He lets the words slide off of him. It’s only a voice with no meaning behind it at all.

*~*~*

”Hey, Dean.”


End file.
